Yellow Palace

The Yellow Palace is a small and intimate facility of seven floors in Tirana. With a monolith concrete system, intervention aimed at transforming it, into a public landmark. Designed in the background of the Dajti Mountain, it gets a mass, a plastic body, which in its spatial transformation becomes a 'monster', an abnormality, a different thing, enabling another read of space this building is located into. The Yellow Palace is a small and intimate facility in Tirana, a 'palazzetto' funded by six households, each in a floor of 125 m2, and ground floor for shops. With a very tight budget, even putting in doubt its construction of 875 m2, was managed to be completed in 2011 at a fund of EUR 250000, making use of modest materials, such as plasters and painting, it risked being a private object, than an asset of the city. With a monolith concrete system, intervention aimed at transforming it, into a public landmark. Protection from sun, serious issue in Tirana, is enabled by inserting within the building the windows of the north-westwards, while south-westwards this role is played by the balcony extending beyond the living space.

The project gives matter to the building, shaping it like a body asking for satisfaction, physical features, sensuality and uniqueness, able to enter into an interaction, to become the point from which to set out towards 'encounter with the other' and to avoid monologues, to be a reference for the 'Hoxha Tahsim' street, that one can easily lose orientation accompanied by usual facades of routine objects. For this reason, it was the clear and vivid stance transforming the ordinary into nonordinary, through use of unusual object. Designed in the background of the Dajti Mountain, it gets a mass, a plastic body, which in its spatial transformation becomes a 'monster', an abnormality, a different thing, enabling another read of space this building is located into. It is not coincidental that Francis Bacon says that the possibility to discover the truth an image contains, lays in the process of its deformation. It is this deformation turning this object into a crash, an awakening, and a distraction, a possibility to measure time and to have control on the road taken.

With a monolith concrete system, The Yellow Palace aimed at transforming, into a public landmark. Protection from sun, serious issue in Tirana, is enabled by inserting within the building the windows of the north-westwards, while south-westwards this role is played by the balcony extending beyond the living space.